Alan White's Olympic diary: The Olympic legacy is too diverse to work under a single political ideology

Let’s talk legacy. What happens when the circus leaves town? Today the Guardian reports that the sale of 21 school playing fields has been approved by the coalition. You’ll forgive a rueful sigh on the part of your correspondent, but it’s for different reasons than you might imagine.

He’d landed this story because the press officers at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) had heard about some research he was doing for a postgraduate course. They offered him an interview with the then-sports minister, Richard Caborn, if he could break their bit of good news.

Alan got his story published, but things didn’t run to plan for the DCMS. A charity called the National Playing Fields Association, which was in the midst of a needlessly vitriolic war with the department, got wind of Alan’s story, and fed the Telegraph a front page splash about how 10,000 fields had been sold between 1979 and 1997. It ran the day before Alan’s story, and as you can imagine this rather took the gloss off the news that 72 new ones had been created.

Now this 10,000 figure (still cited all over the place; even in today’s Guardian piece) appeared to be the result of a methodology slightly less meticulous than that deployed at 10.58pm last Friday, when I dropped my change on the floor and begged the barman to accept I probably had enough down there for a pint. But we’re talking petty political power struggles here, not facts, so let’s soldier on.

The other problem was that Alan decided to sell the Guardian a full transcript of the interview. The Guardian published it online, but the DCMS created such a fuss that they ended up taking it down. They didn’t like the fact I’d actually done my homework beforehand. You’d think the Guardian wouldn’t be scared of the department that deals with all the stuff no one in politics cares about, but these were the days of Malcolm Tucker, for real.

Well screw you, DCMS press staff of 2005: I’ve put it up on my site. Now THAT’s sticking it to the man, even if it is seven years too late. I’ll save you the trouble of reading this incredibly dull interview, but here are some lessons you could draw from reading between the lines.

Despite all the headlines about them, no one at the time had a clue how many playing fields there were in Britain and whether or not there was a surplus or a shortage. Vague estimates could be made about how many had been sold (but not created), so was it a problem – and if so where? No one knew. An audit of sorts was ongoing: as a result Active Places now lists 50,000 different sporting sites. But now we have it, how useful is the information? Well, as you’ll see, it’s not just a question of numbers.

2. What’s new?

Labour did improve things. As I type this I see Andy Burnham MP (of whom more in a second) is tweeting about the 1998 Act that slowed school sales, and which was updated in 2004.

The sale of school fields is now governed by this strict Labour legislation, which says that the sports needs of schools must continue to be met, there must be clear evidence all other sources of funding have been exhausted, and the money must be reinvested in sport. Now if Gove’s somehow got round these guidelines and allowed the sale of fields that are genuinely needed, let’s give him a kicking. Believe me, I’ll be first in the queue, wearing my Tory-arse-seeking winkle pickers. But the Guardian story gives no evidence for this – and wouldn’t we have heard more from the communities involved?

3. Quality, not quantity, is what matters, dear boy.

What’s more likely is that the fields which have been sold are surplus to requirements. This was the key issue back in 2005 when the young (and, for the record, very likeable) Mr Burnham told me: “It would have been wrong to pass legislation which banned the selling of playing fields entirely, because that would have meant it was impossible to facilitate the development of sporting facilities...In some communities there’s a definite need for more space, but the issue is increasingly more about quality than availability.” You can see on my site it was considered the priority by Caborn, too.

Things haven’t changed: if you’re a kid, do you want to play footy on your local club’s pitch, or on the shrub land round the back of the sports hall where a tramp’s just defecated on the half-way line? Assuming your school has a sensible deal with the local council/club, it’s a no-brainer. And – as with at least one of the sites mentioned by the Guardian or as with Leigh Sports Village, a constituency project that Burnham cited to me – the sale can mean it’s going to be turned into a better sporting facility for the community as a whole (one of the directions towards which current legislation attempts to drive schools and local authorities).

There’s a crucial lesson about the Olympic legacy here, which is that it’s too diverse a thing to work under the umbrella of a single political ideology. By all means rage at Tory cuts, say: but remember that the legacy will be delivered by local coaches who care about sport and the kids with whom they work. They’re the ones who know what the real threats to sport in their community are – what impact the scrapping of school sports partnerships (this really IS a huge deal, in my view) will have, whether there actually is an issue with provision of pitches, and so on.

Each will have a different set of challenges, and ideas to tackle them. And you’d be amazed how much impact a well-directed initiative can have – I choose this little tale as an example purely because I know the guy who runs it, but there are so many out there.

If you care about legacy, listen to and support the people in your community who really care about sport; not the ill-informed guff belched out by the political opportunists, be they in the lobby, the House of Commons, or some comedian on Twitter.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.